COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE
Did I ever tell you of my visit to the Comédie Française? Alas, alas! again I have to chronicle a disappointment. I am trying to think what I pictured to myself I was going to see, and I am not at all clear about it. In my childish imagination I must have thought of something I will never see.
Naturally the piece played was Œdipus Rex. Every time I am invited to the Comédie Française I see Œdipus Rex. It seems a particular favourite in Paris, I am sure I cannot tell why.
The scenery was perfect, so were the costumes, but you cannot imagine how uncomfortable I was when I heard the actors, together or one after the other, screaming, moaning, hissing, and calling on the whole audience to witness a misfortune, which was only too obvious.
All the actors were breathless, hoarse, exhausted—in sympathy I was exhausted too, and longed for the entr’acte. Then when at last a pause did come, I began to hope in the next scene a little calm would be established and the actors take their task a little more leisurely. But no! they cried out louder still, threw themselves about in torture, and gesticulated with twice as much violence.
When I heard the voice of Œdipus it reminded me of the night watchers in my own country giving the fire alarm, and all those Turks who have heard it are of the same opinion. As I left the theatre tired out, I said to myself, “Surely it is not possible that this is the idea the Greeks had of Dramatic Art.”
What a difference to the theatre I had known in Turkey! Sometimes our mothers organised excursions, and we were taken in long springless carts, dragged by oxen, to the field of Conche-Dili in the valley of Chalcedonia, where there was a kind of theatre, or caricature of a theatre, built of unpainted wood, which held about four hundred people.
The troop was composed of Armenian men and women who had never been at the Paris Conservatoire, but who gave a fine interpretation of the works of Dumas, Ohnet, Octave Feuillet, and Courteline. The stage was small and the scenery was far from perfect, but the Moslem women were delighted with this open-air theatre, although they had to sit in latticed boxes and the men occupied the best seats in the stalls.
During the entr’acte, there was music and singing, the orchestra being composed of six persons who played upon stringed instruments. The conductor beat time on a big drum, and sometimes he sang songs of such intense sadness that we wondered almost whence they came.
That was a dear little theatre, the theatre of my childhood. Primitive though it was, it was very near to me as I listened to the piercing cries of alarm sent out by Œdipus. Would they not, these rustic actors of the Chalcedonian valley, I wonder, have given a truer and better interpretation of the plays of Sophocles?